Why upgrades are important

What if two players both have 1 upgrade in weapons and 1 upgrade in armor. They would probably cancel each other out. That would mean there is only use in an upgrade until the other player has the counter upgrade. And since the idea of PA is to have long games, both players will have all upgrades before the end.

Thus making upgrades useless

Are you even reading peoples posts on the issues that provides? they have been stated by a few people now (myself included). To briefly reiterate, having a system like this:

• 1) Reduces the readability of a situation (as well as the units) Dedicated units will always be more readable than units with upgrades.
  
  2) Reduces the tactical merit of making decisions based on what players observed via scouting.
  
  3) Requires near zero foresight on the part of the upgrading player in order to gain a leg up in any given situation.
  
  4) Encourages players to put resources towards upgrades rather than fighting a larger scale battle with more units, in other words, upgrades = less units = bad for a macro RTS game

For more detail on those points see any of my prior posts. I feel like I am repeating myself here and not receiving any decent counterarguments in return.

The way that Uber Ent have proposed handling the single unit pool with two Tiers of units are an improvement over a SupCom2 style upgrade system. We should not have upgrades just for the sake of having them if a superior system for handling progression in game is provided (ie no redundancy, dedicated purpose units, larger unit pool, better readability of situations and unit roles).

Upgrades have valid merits. They just aren't part of the game aesthetic. This game's aesthetic. Sure, you can try adding them, but look at what happened to Supcom2. Research didn't solve any problems with previous titles, made extra issues to contend with(like nukes/antinukes or adding instant AA/AG to ground units), and didn't add anything that couldn't be done with smarter macro. Everything about the research system screamed "why are you even there?"

If you want stronger tanks, build more tanks. Want longer range weapons, build more missiles. More gantries => more big units. And so on and so forth. You upgrade the army by getting more army, and you get more macro flexibility with extra structures and mobile build power. That's how TA worked, that's how Supcom1 worked, and that's how ZK worked.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Commander addons are somewhat of a unique circumstance. As a critical target for assassination games, the Comm's survival needs change dramatically from early to mid to late game. This is perhaps worth justifying upgrades that keep the Comm relevant and survivable past 10 minutes.

IMO, it is possible to make the Comm completely functional and survivable without a single addon. Using infrastructure is the best bet for this, as extra resources or special features may turn previously greyed out things into working survival tools. The clearest example is with the TotalA Commander, which survived by means of a D-gun and cloaking device, both of which demanded strong energy production for regular use.

Are you confirming hooks that allow us to change unit stats on the fly? Because if so, i'm totally making a veterancy mod, I goddamn love units becoming stronger, and consolidating my forces around a single highly powerful unit. I always played with totalveterancy in FA and I loved the feeling of using that one monkeylord I managed to keep alive through the entire match. And watching it rapidfire the guns faster than ever was intended, and tank shots that would shred it.

All because I used it in an effective manner, providing (in totalveterancy) a never ending ramp up of unit power, and an incentive to preserve my strike force. With that little pack of 5 tier three commandoes becoming elite strike force units that I genuinely care for.

I'd just like to congratulate bobucles for being a voice of reason in this discussion. Upgrades have their merits, but don't really belong in a TA/SupCom -esque game, nevermind what's basically a spiritual successor.

I agree with bobucles and couple other people. Updates and single unit updates are a good idea but not for PA. From what it seem like there is so much going on air units, land units, ships, asteroids, nukes, moon bases, and whatever other features they want to add. To me it just seems over kill to worry about update and at the end of the day I just want something fun to play.

I think it is less about being overkill and more about it fitting with the plan that has been proposed for PA.

I have been quite active in my arguments against upgrades but I will say that upgrades have their place and work in some strategy games. Games like XCOM simply wouldn't be the same without them.

Uber are approaching PA differently however and I think that having upgrades would work against the design ethos they have set. One of removing obsolescence and tier 2 being more of a horizontal progression than a vertical one. Most of the backers want PA to be deep and complex (bearing in mind complexity in strategy and depth rather than arbitrary complexity), but it is being achieved in different ways and I dont think upgrades are the right fit for it.

Though you are right, upgrades make things more difficult to read across multiple battlefronts, adding the wrong kind of complexity in my opinion.

Are you? Because what you quoted has nothing to do with the rest of your sentence there.

Already responded to this. But I'll also add that hiding upgrades that you've researched is also a common strategy in RTSs with upgrades for when there is no immediate, clear indication that a unit is upgraded. I can see you're response already, "That's bad!". My response is, it's really a matter of opinion. Some people like it and some don't.

This is just plain false. I'm not even going to go into all the decision making that can be made based on scouting when upgrades are in the game outside of the fact that you can scout upgrades and response accordingly.

That really depends on what they are.

You're really blowing the cost of upgrades out of proportion. Their cost is usually around 2-4 units. Their real cost is time. Due to the low resource cost, upgrades will have even less of an impact on unit count in a macro oriented RTS.

I consider a card to be the unit as well as all of its attributes. Changing an attribute means you have a similar, but different card. No matter how you spin it, upgrades either add new cards, or replace existing ones, or both.

That point aside, care to point out any flaws in the rest of that post?

Do you disagree with my argument about there being too many strategies?

Is there anything wrong with my reasoning about rewarding players?

Why does everyone keep referring to zero k? It paled in comparison to Balanced Annihilation...

Yes it is, I am outlining the issues that having upgrades applying instantly across your existing army provide, why I don’t like it and why I don’t feel it is a good fit for what PA are doing with their tiers.

Hiding your upgrades is one thing, however having upgrades applied in a blanket fashion across all relevant units on the field reduces the effectiveness of scouting a force and I’ll explain how. I’ll use SupCom2 as an example here to make my point.

The attacking player scouts out a force of tanks, and sees that they have only a few anti air units with them. The attacker responds by sending an attack force which is weighted towards air units. Suddenly, mid battle there is a flash, and all the defending tanks now have anti air cannons on them and the air units get shredded.

There was no way the attacking player could have predicted that, no matter how much scouting they did. It happened instantly and mid fight. This is bad design, not a matter of opinion. That is what I was referring to when I was mentioning a reduction in the tactical utility of scouting.

Now there are other ways of handling upgrades, such as requiring a building to research certain upgrades like StarCraft does. However that still does not address the readability of units at a glance. You have to click on a unit and then look at the readout in the UI to see what you are up against and that is a step which should be unnecessary in a macro RTS that is steering away from micro where it can. With many fields of battle across multiple planets, I do not think that introducing extra clicks in order to understand what you are up against prior to any given engagement is a good idea. Not when you could have dedicated units instead of upgrades.

As I have said, a dedicated unit will always be more readable than the same unit one or even several upgrade options.

Fair point, you are right, it would depend on the cost of upgrades however I still question the utility of upgrades.

All this said I don’t think that upgrades are a good fit for PA as they are not going to be required for Tier 1 units to remain relevant in gameplay. From what we know so far it strikes me that Uber are leaning more towards horizontal progression with units where you have general units in Tier 1, then specialist units in Tier 2. Rather than having upgrades to keep units up to speed, they are going to have more units with more dedicated tasks. This is in contrast to a vertical progression which necessitates upgrades to prevent unit obsolescence.

Addin to consili's supcom 2 example of why upgrade are bad. (Or at least in this situation) imagine you wanted to snipe a commander with air. Te base is surrounded with anti air and you probably only have one pass at it before all your planes are killed and you are completely defenseless.

The problem with this is that no matter how much scouting you've done, you have no way of telling how many planes you need and how much health the commander has. If you send 25 planes hoping he has low health, but he actually has full veterency and has all health upgrades, he'll probably survive and than you just wasted a lot of planes. Next game you send a fleet of 100 planes, because its late in te game and you think his commander is upgraded. Instead, it turns out you probably needed a fourth of te planes you had, and all your planes are killed, after doing massive overkill to the commander.

I don't know about other people, but I consider this a massive flaw

That's an example of bad design because it's an example of a bad upgrade. I don't think an upgrade should ever change a unit's role, only add utility. Look at Starcraft 2 for example. Marine stim, Stalker blink, Zealot charge, Maurader slow, Banshee cloak, none of these change the role of the unit, only their utility.

I can understand not liking damage/defense upgrades (I like them) since you are going to get them no matter what.

If you have their base scouted, I don't see how you couldn't know that information. Especially the commander health part.

I thought it was clear that I disagreed with the concept of "An RTS can have too many strategies." Gambling by picking a strategey doesn't mean you have no strategy. It may mean you have a bad one. Your comment reminds me of Zeno's paradox or the "Guess when the pop quiz will be next week" riddle.

How early is early and how small is small when you say small advantages early on can spiral out of control to give huge advantages later? I've observed that this tends to not be true. Big advantages, like only losing 20% of your force per engagement in the 1st few skirmishes tend to add up pretty hugely, but why shouldn't they?

When you say you'd be less inclined to keep playing after making a mistake, do you mean leave the match or stop playing the game completey? If the latter, that can be helped by using a ranking system to pit players against other players of similar skill. You may not be very good and make some mistakes, but the other guy will probably do the same since he's not ranked as being very good either, so you have a chance to make it up.

Bad upgrade yes, but I would argue that it is also bad design from a readability perspective. The fact of the matter is that the player can’t know prior to upgrade point, what a unit can do, regardless of scouting. The best you can do is scout the base and see that they have the capacity to research an upgrade. What’s more why should you have to scout a base to be able to tell what a unit in front of you is capable of doing or may be capable of doing while you are fighting it? It works for StarCraft, but PA is not that game and should not be trying to be like it, because they are different kinds of RTS entirely, the micro and the macro.

I would also contest the notion that upgrades do not change the utility of the unit.

• Marines do more damage and can move faster (I suppose this is balanced by removing health so that isn’t so bad)
  
  Zealots move faster and close distances
  
  Mauraders impact your units’ capacity to move
  
  Banshees cloak…well that is self-explanatory.

All of these units can be used in totally new ways with those abilities and would change the way an opponent has to deal with them. Now there is nothing wrong with these abilities, but why can’t the units have them from the start? That way there is no ambiguity, the player knows by looking at the units what they are capable of. Differentiate by having more units, not upgrades. Now in a micro heavy RTS upgrades make sense. But again, when the goal is readability at a glance for a game of a much larger scale than Starcraft, it doesn’t make sense to use the same system.

Zero-K had a fairly unique system where instead of tiers of tech (basic factory builds engies, which can build advanced factories, which can build advanced engies), you had a 'flat' tech tree, where pretty much everything could be built from the start. Instead of having t2 units replacing t1, you had a wide variety of units suited for different purposes, at varying levels of specialization and cost.

People keep talking about it because it's got TA/Supcom-style gameplay, but a completely different approach to tech trees. A different source of ideas.

Plus the whole Spring engine widgets, gadgets and area commands thing is pretty rad.[/understatement]

(First, I didn't read pages 3-9, so if someone else said this, my bad.)

Let's separate out two things here: upgrades and "tech-trees"

An upgrade improves an existing unit. That's what the original poster was talking about as far as I can tell. I'm going to agree with the broad base of the posts I read so far, that these can be unnecessary and don't make sense in this style of strategic game. You're more worried about the ability to make 30x more of something in short order than making each unit 3% better; the spirit of the game isn't to micro-manage to victory, if I'm understanding the game-devs intention so far.

However, traversing tech-trees is different - it unlocks NEW units, or the ABILITY to upgrade/alter units.

In some games these two things get blurred, but I would say that for the kind of game that PA is slated to be, that *upgrades* do NOT make sense, while traversing some form of tech/dependency tree DOES make sense.

Consider this, I've just landed with my commander- a very futuristic robot who is stacked to the nines with utility and destructive power. Surely his memory banks can hold the plans for EVERY unit and EVERY technology that he plans to unfold over the upcoming battle, but because atoms are expensive to move and deal with, I would doubt that his engineering suite would come equipped to build it all, and certainly not in a timely fashion.

An analogy: it is possible for me to bake a pizza in my oven at home. I could even go buy the ingredients and mix 'em up and make my own crust; I could even cure my own sausage. But that all takes TIME and it is very inefficient compared to the infrastructure behind Dominos or Papa Johns. They can have the pizza ready by the time I get in my car and get over there to pick it up- they have the right tools for the job.

So in a game, it makes sense to have diversified requirements to build different units because it a) makes logical sense, if you have the right facilities/infrastructure, you can make something faster and b) it causes the player to have to make strategic decisions.

A player has to be thinking "in five minutes, will I want to have access to bomber jets, or heavily armored ground troops, or amphibious tanks, or shields or..."

Requiring that certain units have prerequisites, and even stacking the requisites fairly deep in a tree is a good thing as long as there is balanced value across the different paths, so that every game you don't see players rushing only one branch of the tree to win. The goal is to create rock-paper-scissors like versatility, so that someone who is being out-macro'ed a bit has a way to counter his foe and make a comeback.

Otherwise games get VERY boring very quickly, and you know the outcome in the first ten minutes. Whether that be because the early-rush kills the player too easily who was focused on improving infrastructure or because the better units that the infrastructure produces are too powerful and can walk all over the lesser units too easily.

Sorry for those who think this is "Too long, did not read" but hopefully for the rest of you it will make a decent case for some forms of requisite infrastructure in the game.

This is already completely solved by tiered factories and construction, without all the downsides that a tech tree would cause. Sup Com 2 was horrible in this regard - Fair enough you need more advanced construction techniques to build more advanced units, but why do you need to "re-learn" how to build an anti-nuke? or an AA unit? Suddenly, the game can be lost because you didn't research something you had no way of knowing you needed. Not my idea of fun :? .

I love my SupCom2 but boy do I hate most of the things it does.

Most of whitch could have been eaisly avoided. (I don't have a problem with "re-learning it" as long as it isn't hard to aquire the neccesary counters, if anything the anti-nuke should have been a given like the basic set of units.)

You catch onto exactly what I'm saying- I'm agreeing the tiered factory system is the tech tree, so upgrades/research are superfluous. it is all about what you have actually built, or what you need to build in order to build something.

In that case, awesome